


pray for us sinners

by doreah



Category: The Handmaid's Tale (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Hate Sex, Post-Finale, Season/Series 03, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:01:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24906511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doreah/pseuds/doreah
Summary: Self-harm, Moira thinks.Divine vengeance for sin, Serena Joy thinks.Whatever it is, whatever its origins in man or god or simply nothing at all, it tastes sour and rotten. If shared grief had a flavour, it would be the same as kissing the enemy.
Relationships: June Osborne | Offred & Moira Strand, June Osborne | Offred/Serena Joy Waterford, Odette/Moira Strand, Serena Joy Waterford/Moira Strand
Comments: 4
Kudos: 38





	pray for us sinners

**Author's Note:**

> Please don't ask what this is. I don't have an answer. This came to me months ago and wouldn't leave me alone until I did it, so this is an entirely self-indulgent exercise to free myself from its grasp.

It could be said, if scholars of the future ever deemed to study such topics, that this was all about isolation, loneliness, and a lack of human connection. Because, after all, loneliness does not center on nothingness itself, but rather the bone deep, eviscerating absence of _something_. It's the savage pull of the heart towards something that once was there with definition and certainty yet has now disappeared. In that space left behind, loneliness takes up residence to fill the void, but its poison only makes the hole bigger, more unmanageable, a vortex eating away at its own edges until swallowing the rest of the world whole. 

_Something_ can be anything really because grief strides hand in unlovable hand with its partner, careless about origin. But usually, it is a person whose absence wounds the most.

For Moira, that is June Osborne.

For Serena Joy, that is also June Osborne.

Maybe the impact of June's absence is not completely for the same reason but loneliness is the only explanation, so they both take it, pass it between them like a hot potato, never holding on to the idea too long but always catching it again. There could be a hundreds other reasons why, but it is likely those would be lies told for the sole purpose of never being truly known. There exists in the unspoken words, the silence on the borders of what is said, a vulnerability to the truth. For women so set on impermeability, on static indifference and blindingly stubborn stoicism, it is too much to admit weakness even when it finds its twin.

When Moira thinks about it, but never too long or too hard, a blanket of guilt effectively covers everything else. 

“Why are _you_ here?” There are no kind greetings, only suspicion with a peculiar but not unexpected flavour of disgust. Serena doesn’t expect visitors, and she certainly had not expected to see June’s friend ever again. After all, she got what she came for: the baby and her pound of flesh. 

_Gender traitor_.

Serena swallows at the memory of those words being flung at her, so violently, so accurately, as like recognizes like in the darkest places. 

A casual shrug accompanies Moira’s words. “I had to make sure it was true.” Her lips curl up, as Disney villains do with that special kind of glee at misfortune. “Waterford came through, huh? All’s fair in love and war criminals.”

She’s proud of herself for that one, clearly. Maybe not so much for the witless wordplay but more so for the way Serena’s whole body shudders and shrinks back against the concrete wall. Anger flirts with her gaze but with perhaps the only intelligence she’s displayed since arriving in Canada, she says nothing to that, instead settling for a grim tightening of her lips until the pink turns white. Much like her knuckles around the back of the chair she is leaning on.

They both know the trial will involve the death penalty. The case will take time to build, and when it’s ready, Serena Joy Waterford will stand on trial in the International Criminal Court, her first visit to the Netherlands. What a shame, Moira thinks, without any real concern, there is just so much good weed there and she won’t get to enjoy it at all.

This is the last time Moira will see this particular villain alive, and the malevolent thrill that courses up her spine at the prospect should scare her more than it does, but somewhere between the Red Center and Jezebels, her capacity for empathy for those in power, no matter their sex, died. Once, she had ignored the lesser Waterford on their first venture to Toronto and focused solely on the man who raped her, who raped her best friend. But now? Wives, Commanders, Guardians, Aunts. They're all the fucking same with the same culpability, the same blood on their hands, the same red of Handmaid’s dresses in their vision. 

She hopes Serena Joy bleeds to death very slowly, the way she deserves to suffer. Painfully, gasping for breath, pleading with the vicious little god she created in her own image. 

There is likely a part of Serena that wishes the same for Moira.

“Thought about your last meal?” A snide flash of her teeth comes with the words.

Prepared already and back in true form, Serena Joy’s shoulders roll back and her posture stiffens. With a voice gravelly and sharp, she snaps back. “Of course.” Curiously, there is a flush, just barely pinkening her chest and cheeks and Moira stumbles over the reason. “Twinkies and banana nut pancakes.”

The idea means nothing to Moira but seems uncharacteristically sweet and synthetic for a woman with Serena Waterford’s demeanor; probably some sort of feeble attempt at sarcasm, really. However, figuring out her deepest thoughts and feelings has never been a concern for Moira as this woman means nothing to her. Her motives, her desires, her innermost fears, all pointless blather. All that matters has ever been the way June has been treated, or mistreated at her most savage whims, and Emily has been nothing if not graphic with her knowledge of that household. 

“Are you even remotely sorry?”

“For what?” There is not even an ounce of shame in her question, and something in Moira’s body begins to boil. “I did what was best.”

Incredulous doesn’t even begin to describe the cascade crashing down against her ears. “Best? That’s your defense?”

Serena moves now, suddenly, stalking, strangely intimidating in her long strides and towering height. A feral caged cat pacing in its cage. The whip of Serena’s metaphorical tail and the baring of fangs is all it takes for Moira to take one step back. Just one, because she can’t show weakness now, not when suddenly she’s the prey.

“I saved her life,” she spits, too close for comfort. “If she hadn’t fallen pregnant, she would have rotted in the Colonies by now. I _saved_ her.”

“You raped her!” Moira can’t stand it. She can’t stand across from this criminal and admit the reality of the situation, that it’s not entirely untrue, as repulsive as it is.

Serena flinches at least at the accusation, but more likely because she thinks it’s false. “No.” Growling, she refuses to admit her guilt. “The father, our driver, did.”

There’s something that flashes in Serena’s blue eyes as they narrow, something Moira has seen before in other women, in her own reflection. “You wish you did.”

Irrefutable scarlet seeps up Serena’s chest, more vivid, more obvious than before and she says nothing at first. No snappy defense, no indignant denial, because they are not stupid women going head to head here. She, the true architect of Gilead, can tell that when Moira looks at her in that way of absolute knowing, she doesn’t mean it literally—or maybe she does, in some small way. It doesn’t matter because the words are a reflection. In and amongst the reeds and tangles, scattered inbetween the lines of prayer and holy verse, the truth lies so barren and bright that even Moira can pick it out in the eyes of her enemy. 

No, it wasn’t rape Serena longed for. They both know that. Her crime—her _fantasy_ is much worse than a fleeting physical act of sexual power and aggression with the lasting trauma of violation. Ownership comes close, but Serena had that too. Sickening obsession, definitely. Envy seems more apt, to fully experience what it is she lacks: what men have and she cannot, to attempt to create life if she herself cannot bear it in her womb, to worship with all glory and honor at an altar of flesh, draped in the scent of primal female hunger, the blessing to love a body instead of coveting another woman’s child. To become holy. To become whole.

 _Ora pro nobis peccatoribus_. Latin incantations from long lost studies come back to her as she conjures up the shadows of the missing piece coming to life between them here.

Moira yearns for a lost friend, and a dead woman; Serena longs for one merely dead to her.

It’s the hope that wounds the deepest, not the absence itself. Clinging to that pathetic, desperate sliver of light that, perhaps, it only needs time and time will at some point cross that chasm, comes at a cost. Each moment then is saturated with “what if” and each subsequent second is the reality: there is no “what if” anymore. What if is what is not. Yet, even so, hope claws its way back in, deeper, more insidious, more irrational despite everything in the world screaming that defeat is the only place to go now.

Second after second, there is a blooming, then a dying. How many times can a person die in one day? In a month? In a year? People used to call that resilience but such a reliance on a never-materializing hope really just feels like arsenic.

Maybe it is exactly that poison that led them both here. Grasping for hope in the only place remaining, a mirage, a fantasy. A delusion. The baby, Nichole, is a mere stand-in for her mother and everyone knows it. Luke knows it, Moira knows it, Serena knows it—although she may be the least aware of all of how deep those roots grow. Her cravings are living on her skin, crawling through the fine hairs along her arms, jumping like lice, contagiously, onto any vulnerable person.

What if they can meet in the middle of loss?

The possibility is repulsive.

  
  
  


_Self-harm_ , Moira thinks. _Divine vengeance for sin_ , Serena Joy thinks.

Whatever it is, whatever its origins in man or god or simply nothing at all, it tastes sour and rotten. If grief had a flavor, it would be the same as kissing the enemy. So, they don’t face that together. Serena refuses, dodges her mouth away with a sneer and the rage builds in Moira’s veins even more, so she pushes her against the wall hard enough for it to hurt. It’s not that Moira minds the rejection, in fact it comes as a relief, but the principle is enough to raise her blood.

Tenderness is reserved for those who care. Neither of them does, not about the person in their midst anyway. 

Serena Joy’s hands are large and painful in their grip, in the way they pull at the edge of clothes, the tiny, careless scrape of nails against heated skin. Moira doesn’t pay attention to the flinching as she shoves her hand under the waistband of Serena's pants, the clenching, the wincing, not even as she pushes her fingers without preamble deep into Serena’s body, like she’s purposely tearing open a barely healed wound. All bloodlust and bitterness. She ignores the groan of what could be pain, but notices how it's tempered by something shameless and yet urgent from deep in Serena Joy’s belly.

It’s ugly when Moira thinks about it, about what she’s doing to this woman, doing _with_ her, because those hands that have surely held June down are gripping too tightly. Perhaps this is the only way to truly injure such a woman: bring her to the edge of her desire for someone she can never have and remind her of that impossible ask. To dangle it in her face, to taunt, to rip it away from her and coldly laugh at the loss.

 _This is the closest you’ll ever get to something you can never have_.

Though no sound comes out, Moira shrieks those words with every hard push, every time she grinds her hand against Serena Joy Waterford’s clit and she pants and squirms, with those flushed cheeks yet troubled crease in her brow, with her eyes squeezed shut. 

_You’ll never have her_. _How does that feel?_

When Serena pushes back, gaze alight, freed just as she’s on the cusp of losing control, they stumble back until the screech of an old bed frame echoes in the quiet cell. Those lumbering hands are all over Moira again, under her bra, under her underwear and Moira knows this is a vicious and starving woman, made piteous by her desire. She knows her way around a woman's body, in a way Moira hadn’t expected from her, but when she sees Serena there, all she can think about is June as if somehow, in the years together, they’ve become one and the same person.

It kills any semblance of grudging arousal she may have had almost instantly, that vision of her best friend. Sorrow washes over her, and there is nothing satisfying about the way surprisingly skillful fingers have found their place. They feel wrong, too large, too unfamiliar, _not Odette_. And all she can see is June’s blonde hair. Vomit begins to seep up her throat until it’s unbearable and she rips her body out of Serena Joy’s greedy grasp.

Rage takes hold of everything, for her missing friend, for missing her friend, for this woman who lies unapologetically, unrepentant, with her tax-payer funded clothes askew and blonde hair loose and tangled. She doesn’t deserve luxury, not now. Not when June is still in Gilead, maybe dead, Nichole is still motherless, and this monster lives in relative comfort awaiting her Twinkies and fucking pancakes. 

Loneliness is a corrupt type of power, she thinks, it must be because her fist finds a cotton blouse first, her other hand yanks at that pretty blonde hair, and it takes very little to pull her up, shove her back against the wall once more. Mutual discomfort is the only thing that makes it bearable. Her height is the only thing that reminds Moira that it isn’t June.

She’s still wet from before, and there are no reserves of kindness to tap into, so Moira drives two fingers back inside this creature who crumples, eyelids clenched shut and cries out a pathetic yelp. Moira knows it’s for June and she feels that heartache too like an echo. 

  
  
  


Serena Joy doesn’t open her eyes during _it_ , not once. Not until she turns her back and can wipe the tears away in secret. If she had, there could have been no illusion to cling unto.

Moira was never one to hold her tongue and not appease the tickle of her curiosity. 

“You're in love with her, aren’t you?” It’s a bold move, and one that would have had her beaten had this still been Gilead instead of Canadian prison cell as Serena Joy brusquely pulls her blouse back into place with jilted movements, seething anger to cover the unrequited longing. It's laughable, too, for Moira to believe that this woman could ever feel anything even approaching a love that isn't saturated entirely in profound obsession. 

For a long time, her back remains to Moira on the edge of the small bed, posture stiff and eerily serene. “Don’t be ridiculous.” Every syllable is a bite. Every syllable is a lie.

That isn’t quite a _No_ but Moira doesn’t push further, asking why or how, knowing already the futility of wringing truth from the purposefully mute. The words themselves, the shameful admission of dissonance, is unnecessary when she recalls the soft, almost imperceptible heartbroken whisper of her best friend’s name in her ear during the climax of their repulsive tryst. It’s some small mercy that Moira realizes that she wasn’t the focus of Serena’s attention, not in any way that mattered at least. 

It was a fuck. Hardly different than any number of nameless ones in club toilets. A hard, desperate, dirty fuck in a prison cell with a condemned woman whose death will be a literal national holiday one day. An attempt to bring the devil to her knees in submission.

But Serena was too lost in June’s ghost to fall, in the clinging fantasy of Nichole as a substitute for that missing piece, in any place that isn’t here on the precipice of her own death. Moira was lost in nothingness, in the hollow space that Odette left behind, that June left behind, in Odette’s photograph in the binder, in the memory of June, in her best friend’s laughter and all the memories that they will never have again.

The worst part is she wants to cry. Not whimper in a corner of her bedroom, but sob and fucking howl openly because Luke just doesn’t get it. He aches too, of course he does. He stays up all night sometimes, unable to close his eyes for even a brief rest. His self-pity is suffocating and leaves no room for Moira or Nichole. Shared mourning for June’s absence has no place in that apartment.

The cell here is empty, with plenty of space and Serena has nothing but misery to share. For the most cruelly-designed reasons, the person that understands Moira’s grief best created the system that brought it to life. She wants to scream, _scream_ until the roar of her pain shakes the bars from the windows. She wants Serena Joy Waterford to wail with her, until the glass breaks, until the walls collapse, and until Gilead crumbles into dust and June is free and Serena Joy is buried under its rubble.

Instead, they stand apart, barely a hint that anything at all had been shared. 

Adamantly, absurdly, Serena doubles down. “I protected her.” 

_I love her too_ , Moira wants to say in return.

Perhaps it’s true that June was protected somehow, in some perverted way by this woman, but Moira will have no way to confirm until June is safe because she doesn’t trust the claims of a war criminal, she doesn’t know about the beating from Aunt Lydia, the nights spent by hospital beds, the escape that June chose to turn from, the stabbing and the lies, the late night planning for Ceremony enforcement. She also doesn’t know Serena’s role in inflicting the same pain. All she does is cling to the void of hope.

She settles for the other truth because Nichole is here, the Waterfords are here, Emily is here, _but June still isn’t_. “Not enough.”

Nothing will be enough anymore. 

Except the feeling in this room, a lonesome, shared nostalgia for what isn’t and hasn’t been, yearning for lost possibilities. For waiting, and hope. For missing and mourning June Osborne. Moira bangs on the door and it slams behind her, leaving Serena Joy Waterford alone with the cloying stink of phantom love like a missing limb.

They’ve both had enough of that.

  
  
  



End file.
